Saturday, June 15, 2013

Useful processes to kill in OSX

From time to time, some of user interface or system process go crazy or freeze. It's always good to know how to kill and restart those processes them without restarting the system.

  • Frozen Finder: Kill it. Restarts by itself
    > sudo killall Finder
  • Frozen Spotlight: Kill it. Restarts by itself
    > sudo killall SystemUIServer
  • mDNSResponder sometimes gets stuck (observed in 10.5 and 10.6) and as it does so the system-wide name resolving stops working. Meaning that internet names are not resolved anymore
    > sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist
    > sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist
    or ometimes it also works to kill it and restarts by itself
    > sudo killall mDNSResponder
  • If mds goes crazy indexing some new volume: Stop it:
    > sudo mdutil -i off /path_to_volume
    or stop it on all volumes with:
    > sudo mdutil -a -i off
  • ... any other?

Sources:
http://superuser.com/questions/231517/how-can-i-quit-frozen-spotlight-without-rebooting-my-computer
http://linuxtoosx.blogspot.fr/2011/10/restart-mdnsresponder.html
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/stopspotlightindex.html
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3789#

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